Jordan Sargent

October 1, 2013 –
"Ratchet" is how Los Angeles producer DJ Mustard decided to tag the minimal, often lewd rap music he's helped to create. Take Tyga's "Rack City," or his own Ketchup mixtape, for example. The sound usually comprises simple keyboard melodies grounded by heavy bass and muffled chants, and has roots in Atlanta's strip club culture and L.A.'s own G-funk. But another influence looms large: Bay Area hyphy, the kingdom of E-40 for multiple decades running. Always an adventurous collaborator, 40 has been a player in the ratchet scene as well, most notably on his own "Function," which featured Compton MCs Problem and YG. But his new excellent new single "Episode" begins another important chapter.Though the track doesn't feature any L.A.

October 1, 2013 –
Yesterday, Drake became the "global ambassador" of his hometown basketball team, the Toronto Raptors. With brand new album Nothing Was the Same freshly under his belt, October's Very Own should be over the moon right about now (or perhaps above the rim). Then again, in their 18 years of existence, the Raptors have made the playoffs just five times and advanced past the first round only once. The best player in franchise history — Chris Bosh, who incidentally looks like a raptor — has won back-to-back championships as a member of LeBron James' Miami Heat.

October 1, 2013 –
It was only in July that Migos' "Versace" began to take over the world thanks to a late-June remix from Drake, but the song has lived a very full life. Since then the SPIN interview subjects made their New York City debut, went shopping at the Versace store at Phipps Plaza mall in Atlanta and saw the track remixed by more than 40 other artists, including Frank Ocean (sorta). Still, "Versace" somehow never got the video treatment until just now. Thankfully, the delayed results are appropriately epic.Directed by Gabriel Hart, the clip sets the three Migos — plus Zaytoven, the track's producer — in a glorious mansion, where they drape themselves in Versace and in girls who are also wearing Versace.

September 30, 2013 –
Justin Timberlake's "TKO" is a song about losing a fight to a vagina (metaphorically, we think). This is self-evidently cringeworthy before you even press play and hear Timbaland stutter "she kill me with the coo-coochie-coochie-coo" or listen to Timberlake try to fill 7-minutes with boxing metaphors (there are no whistles in boxing, Justin). Logic would hold that it'd be even more painful to watch all of this happen in public, and that's exactly the case with his performance of "TKO" on The Ellen DeGeneres Show — even though Timberlake is supposed to be a "vanguard" this entire thing is kind of like watching your dad sing about sex. (Sorry for that image.)"TKO" is the second single — following "Take Back the Night" — from The 20/20 Experience: 2 of 2, his super-long new album that we like a bit less than its predecessor The 20/20 Experience.

September 30, 2013 –
Fall Out Boy are doubling down on surprise albums. Just months after emerging from a semi-break up with April's Save Rock and Roll, the Chicago stadium-punks have announced Pax Am Days, their second full-length of 2013. The lead single is "Love, Sex, Death" — which you can hear over at Rolling Stone — a 90-second detour back to the band's scuffed-up basement roots. The song (and album, presumably) is a conscious flipside to Save Rock and Roll, the record that sparked the band's pop revival. But Pete Wentz's lyrics at least provide a consistent thread: "Welcome to the demolition derby that is my heart."As Wentz teased over the summer, the band recorded the album in two days at Ryan Adams' Pax Am Studio — hence the name — in Los Angeles.

September 27, 2013 –
Action Bronson has a sense of humor, which you can see in, say, his recent Riff Raff collaboration "Long Pinky" or the time he gamely performed at a retirement home. But he topped himself earlier this week during a show in Bloomington, Indiana, while on the road with Danny Brown for the pair's "2 High 2 Die" tour. While the Rare Chandeliers rapper was performing, a fan evidently threw a cigarette at Bronson, forcing him to stop the show. Where another rapper might have jumped into the crowd, Bronson hauled the man onstage.There Bronson forced the alleged perpetrator to sit with his legs crossed on the stage in what was essentially time out. "Don't move, you understand me?" he asked the guy before telling him, "You've been a bad boy." Bronson then moved the fan from the side of the stage to a much less glamorous position behind the DJ booth.

September 27, 2013 –
Chief Keef is Chief Keef, and he probably isn't changing for a while. The Chicago rapper's new video for "Ight Doe" primarily features he and friends waving handguns around — just weeks after a warrant was reportedly issued for his arrest. That warrant was for failing to pay child support, but given Keef's history of run-ins with the law just this year, a judge probably would not look favorably on him openly promoting his firearm collection. As a song, "Ight Doe" is hard yet kind of hilariously blasé, as Keef circles back to the title with a distinct nonchalance: "This nigga said he's gonna rob me? / Aight doe." It's not nearly as dynamic as his best songs — "Macaroni Time," "Where He Get It," or "I Ain't Done Turnin Up" — have been this year, but it continues the mumbling underwater aesthetic Keef dove into on his most recent mixtape Bang Pt. 2.

September 27, 2013 –
Friday, September 206:45 p.m. The Mondrian hotel on South Beach is on the edge of the Miami peninsula's west side, a bit of a walk from the actual beach and the glitz that accompanies it. The building is white and faceless from the front, distinguished from the two luxury condos that sandwich it only by its curved architecture. The area immediately surrounding the hotel slants more towards Miami's reality than its glamorous image, as low-slung apartment buildings bulging with cluttered balconies loom over modest one-story homes, tiny office complexes, and mini-strip malls. One day all of this will be razed for buildings that are bigger, prettier, and more expensive.But inside, the Mondrian looks and feels like South Beach proper.

September 26, 2013 –
Tonight, Kanye West sent out a series of all-caps tweets lashing out at Jimmy Kimmel, who last night aired a parody of West's four-part interview with BBC's Zane Lowe. Here is the gist of the parody: Kimmel hired child actors to repeat West's most hysterical statements during the interview. That's really it. It's funny if you like watching children acting as adults, but either way it's really very innocuous. Unless you're Kanye, in which case you were very mad tonight. So mad that you went on an actual rant on Twitter, as opposed to the canned rambling you do you at your shows that nonetheless get labeled as ranting. West contends that Kimmel was "out of line" for trying to "spoof in any way the first piece of honest media in years," although spoofing celebrities is literally Jimmy Kimmel's job description.